It pays to trust your employees

Study indicates that employees who are trusted by managers do better work and are more loyal to their employer.

A Closer Look at Trust Between Managers and Subordinates: Understanding the Effects of Both Trusting and Being Trusted on Subordinate Outcomes

The authors propose that trust in the subordinate has unique consequences beyond trust in the manager. Furthermore, they propose joint effects of trust such that subordinate behavior and intentions are most favorable when there is high mutual trust. Findings reveal unique relationshipsof trust in manager and trust in subordinate on performance,organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and intentions toquit. Furthermore, the interaction of trust in manager and trustin subordinate predicts individual-directed OCB in the hypothesizeddirection.

This study, like many in management research, uses trust as defined by Mayer & Davis:

The definition of trust proposed in this research is the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party.